Format Tables in Office 2010

You can manually format a table and its content in much the same way you format any other text: Use the formatting commands on the Home tab, for example. But the Design tab also has special formatting controls that apply specifically to tables.

For example, you can apply table styles to a table to automatically apply border and shading colors and styles, to automatically autofit the content, and to automatically apply different font formatting for the heading rows.

To apply a table style, follow these steps:

1. Click anywhere in the table.

2. On the Design tab, click the down arrow to the right of the Table Style samples to open the full list of table styles.

3. While the list is open, point to a style. You can see a preview of it applied to your table, behind the open list.

4. Click the style you want to apply.

The check boxes in the Table Style Options group enable you to specify how the table style will be applied. For example, you can choose whether the header row is formatted differently than the rest of the table. If you choose Banded Rows, every other row will have a different color background, for easier reading.